


Longer Way to Go

by juniperpines



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Backstory, Friendship, Gen, Starfleet Academy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-17
Updated: 2014-08-17
Packaged: 2018-02-13 14:12:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2153580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniperpines/pseuds/juniperpines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tasha's first year at the academy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Longer Way to Go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thisparticularlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisparticularlight/gifts).



_take me on the trip and i’ll never get sick_  
 _take me wherever you go and I won't complain along the way_  
 _well I've been waiting so long to say bye, bye, bye_  
 _this town ain't give me nothing but bald head and trouble_

_well i came from the delta down to the plains_  
 _when i got back home there was nothing out of range_

\-- “Pensacola,” Deerhunter

 

“Why do you think you can’t sleep?” the intake admin asks.

Tasha looks at anything but her. The wall is a dull grey, probably meant to be soothing to the rare headcases that Starfleet misses in its intensive screening process, who find their way here. There is a hard, narrow table between them that the other woman rests her folded hands on. Out the window is the still unfamiliar planet, with its surface water and pristine clouds.

She can’t face her questioner, but her mind works on the answer. _Because I can’t get used to sleeping above ground?_ It’s enough of an answer to her, but it won’t be enough for the psychologist.

Other thoughts flit through her mind -- what it’s like to be adrift without a course of study among the best and brightest in the galaxy. She doesn’t know how the hell she got accepted here.

 _Because I need a sleeping drug_ is next after that, the one thought haunting her for weeks. She didn’t have to come to Psychological Services to get what she needed. Even on a pollyanna planet there are other ways, but that is old ground and if there is anything Tasha Yar is determined about, it is that she is never going back.

She finally sneaks a look at the other woman. She is so young, she can’t be much older than Tasha herself. “I want to explain it to the doctor.”

“They like us to take the histories,” the woman says in the soft accent that Tasha can’t quite place.

“It’s a long story, I don’t feel like telling it twice.”

The real doctor isn’t even in that day. When Tasha hears that, she is up and out of her seat. They don't take this seriously, catering to cadets whose biggest problem is keeping their uniforms pressed. She should have known they wouldn’t be prepared for someone like her.

The admin apologizes at the door and doesn’t try to stop her from leaving, but encourages her to come back. “Talk to someone else if you don’t want to talk to me,” she says.

“Like who?” Tasha has no one, absolutely no one. This girl at least has her hair and her assumptions. How many personal friends is she supposed to have made since the session started? She shakes her head, finds the wide smile that everyone likes to see. “You know what? I’m gonna be just fine.”

She works up the nerve to go back a week later. The sun rising over the Earth hills is becoming too familiar a late night companion. She can’t ignore her problem; the only time she manages any quality sleep is for forty-five minutes during quantum theory, and that is not going to cut it on several levels.

When she does return, the assistant isn’t there. She is ushered into the back room where an older woman in uniform listens, glasses hanging on a chain around her neck. She agrees that with Tasha’s history of dabbling with drug abuse, sleeping aides aren’t the right answer. What she really needs to do is talk.

A few weeks later, before the weather turns, Tasha is running around the lake in the park, driving the balls of her feet hard against the ground with every stride and directing the energy to propel her forward, forward, forward. Each step hits the pavement with a sound the therapist encourages her to associate with nothing other than itself. So, she tries to let go of the hail on the roof of her foster parents’ home in Atlanta and projectile shelling in the abandoned quarter on Turkana IV, let go of everything but her pounding footsteps in the sunshine on a late fall day.

When she is exhausted, she takes another lap at a walking pace, enjoying the unsteadiness of her legs under her. Her sweat is cool on the backs of her her calves, and where her short ponytail tickles the back of her neck. Pushing herself to her limit seems to make the world come into focus a little better around her.

Halfway around the lake, a voice calls out, “Tasha?” Tasha can’t place the girl coming toward her in an academy uniform as she gets up from her place on the grass with her PADDs cradled in one arm. “It’s Deanna… Deanna Troi. We met… well…”

“At the psych center,” Tasha says slowly. “You’re a cadet.”

“Fourth year,” Deanna agrees. The insignia on her collar tell the same story. “I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear. They like us psychology students to start our clinical experience now, but…” She looks uncomfortable, whether with her own insufficiencies or something else, but either way it somehow makes Tasha feel more secure. “I felt awful about your leaving.”

“You shouldn’t.” After a moment, she feels compelled to add, “I went back. They have me working with Captain Allen. It’s… helping.”

Deanna looks relieved. “I’m so glad to hear it.” She falls into step with her. “Asking for help is really a brave thing to do, and it’s smart to do it so early. Not everyone does admit their problems while they can do something about them. The Academy is a stressful transition for anyone.”

“Stressful?” Tasha laughs. “I’m not stressed.” 'Stressful' is not three meals a day -- and cooked from the mess hall, if she wants them, not replicated. Or worse, the tasteless emergency humanitarian rations they used to be lucky to be able to trade for on the black market. Stressful isn’t a new uniform whenever she wants it, or a place to sleep every night with a door that locks. Deanna is looking at her curiously. “I’m not. I’ve just been having trouble sleeping.” She looks around at the families on the grass enjoying the afternoon. “It’s this damn planet.”

.

The thing is, it does get easier, at least in some ways. The curriculum is still a challenge, a hole that she’s digging herself out of.  Primary education wasn’t exactly a civic priority where she's from.

It starts to sink in, though, that this isn’t Atlanta. Her roommate is an unjoined Trill who washed out of the symbiont matching process and is using Starfleet as her fallback, focusing on interplanetary treaty law. She seems to have more free time than anyone else Tasha knows and spends it all with the chess team, trash talking each others’ moves and trying to convince them to take up four dimensional chess. Across the hall are two Vulcan third years who are almost always at the labs, intent over their exozoology studies. They host a music circle in their room on Thursday evenings, three lutes, two lyres, and an ocarina, and they came by at the beginning of the term to apologize for the noise.

None of them are like her foster family, well meaning people who felt blessed to have a human foster child for once. She was grateful for their kindness, less so for the sense that they were waiting for her to be healed and get better, that they seemed to have a vision of who she was supposed to be on the other end that she couldn’t see.

It’s a relief that slowly grows in her that the alien women on her hall don’t have the same expectation. She’s not sure what they make of her, but “human, but from another planet” draws fewer questions than she is braced for.

The rest of it, she'll muscle through.

.

Deanna’s room is on a neighboring hall, a few flights up. Tasha is walking by, on her way to deliver a PADD to a classmate, when she recognizes the voice that floats out of the open door, laughing.

She catches a glimpse of Deanna holding something sheer, orange, and diaphanous up to her chest over her cadet uniform, letting the skirt flow behind her while her long dark hair falls over her shoulders. She strikes a pose with her face held high, her dark eyes alight and her mouth firmly closed over laughter that’s about to explode again.  Her roommate sits on the high bunk and clucks her tongue.

Tasha keeps walking.

.

She’s been sleeping better, but when she doesn’t, the dreams follow her into her sleepless fugue. Last night she moved all of the furniture in her temporary quarters on the Starfleet ship (her first), sliding it out from the corners of the room to block the wide sliding door. The sickbay nurse who’d been assigned to check on her couldn’t make sense of it when she rang the buzzer.

At least they were smart enough to send a woman.

She runs six miles before breakfast, but isn't particularly hungry afterward. She nurses a cup of coffee in the mess hall while a scone waits on a plate in front of her.

“This is why I never see you here, you’re an early bird,” Deanna says. “May I join you?”

“Sure.” Tasha eyes her as she sets her tray down on the table. Fresh fruit salad, sausage, toast, and hot tea.  A well-balanced meal.

“I know I’m going to have to change my habits before I get my first posting, but until then I don’t see the point of getting up when I don’t have an early class. They figured that out about me at the clinic and schedule me for the swing shifts, so at least I have an excuse for sleeping in most of the time.  Plus, they don't serve nearly enough chocolate at breakfast for my taste so if I'm going to skip a meal, it's usually this one.” Deanna butters her toast as she rambles. “Do you have class soon?”

“Not until this afternoon.”

“Still having trouble sleeping?” Deanna asks casually, like that wasn’t the whole point of sitting down across from her.

“Now and then.” Tasha finds no reason not to be honest. She's an old hand at therapy talk and might as well give an aspiring shrink something to practice on. “It gets better for a while, then there’s a bad night.”

“That’s rather typical,” Deanna says, and then seems to realize she might be overstepping. “I mean, for insomnia, in general… Are you still running?”

“Why, did you read somewhere that it was supposed to help?” Tasha smiles over the rim of her coffee cup.

“Well it is… but I was hoping we could run together some time. I have my final field fitness test in a few months. I want to pass the first time.”

Tasha puts down her mug, circles her fingers around it, feeling the irrational wall at her back. “Look, you seem like a really nice person, but I don’t need you to find reasons to be my friend.”

“It might be wise to have at least one, don’t you think?” Deanna says mildly.

.

Troi is serious -- dead serious -- about improving her running, even if she doesn’t really seem to fear failing the test. Tasha can’t imagine she’s ever failed at anything in her life. She looks fit, but she is softer where Tasha is lean, and her legs are shorter. No one has ever really looked at her stride, so there is work to do. They make plans to meet the next week after Tasha gets back from the planetary orbit training at Jupiter station.

Tasha pushes the plate with her untouched scone away.  She shouldn't have even taken it from the buffet line, but she was so tired that she wasn't thinking.

She can’t help herself. She takes a napkin and folds the scone inside, tucks it into her palm. They recycle the matter here, just like on a starship; it’s not like she’d be throwing away something that won’t have another life. But it’s food, and she just can’t.

Deanna watches like she understands more than she possibly could.

.

They bunk eight girls to a room on Jupiter station. The CO, a short lieutenant from Miami Beach, likes to call them out at midnight or oh-four-hundred and run them through the paces while they still have sleep in their eyes. Sometimes it’s as simple as an orbital adjustment of the station or a transport launch. Other times the computer sounds an asteroid alert or puts a Romulan warbird on the screen, and the team scrambles to respond before the simulation kills them all.

"Cadet Yar, integrate the possible impact trajectories and output the optimal escape path."  She can see the crest of his sunbleached hair from her station, and the way his hands curl over the armrests of the command station's chair.

"Yes sir."  She works the flow of the keypad, adjusting, accounting, letting the computer do most of the work as they've been taught.  It's complicated, but she's sure she's right.  Her adrenaline is finally working for her instead of against her.  It's exhilarating.  "Course calculated, sir."

"Transmit to helm."

"Helm is locked, sir." The young man seated at that station taps the left quadrant again and again.

"Five, four, three, two, one..." the lieutenant counts down in a drawl as the screen shows the chunk of space rock heading toward them, and then a bright, blinding flash.  "You cadets are barbequed tuna today."

Succeed or fail, Tasha crawls into bed every night with procedures and contingencies in her head, going over them among the whispers of the other women until she falls sound asleep.

The day before they leave, the lieutenant calls them each into his office one by one for an evaluation. Tasha stands at attention in front of his desk as he flicks through her service record, and tries not to cringe. It’s all in there, her whole past, since she was rescued by Starfleet personnel.

“What are your plans, cadet?” he finally asks. He stretches and rises from behind the desk. “I see you don’t have a course of study yet. Your marks so far are no better than average.”

“Yes sir,” she says without excuse. “I haven’t decided yet sir.”

“You like this, though?” He circles round the office, and says, “Eyes front,” when they follow him.

Tasha snaps to. “Yes sir.”

“Yes sir what?”

“Yes sir, I have found the drills this week very engaging.”

“You hesitated yesterday on beta shift, during the energy transfer protocol." He's a half a head shorter than her, which means with eyes front she's practically looking over the crown of his head when he comes to stand in front of her. "You do that during a real mission and everyone could die. We can't have that in Starfleet."

"No sir." She keeps her shoulders back and her nose up.

He walks around and sits back behind his desk. "I'm not sure this if for you, Yar. There's no room for mediocrity here, for someone who doesn't hold to Starfleet values. You'll have to shape up if you want to have a career here. Oh, and do something about that hair. It's not regulation."

She manages to leave the offices and walk to the turbolift with her head high before she lifts a finger to touch the wispy ends of hair that have escaped her clip at her collar, and wonders just what it is he doesn't see in her.

.

_Tasha ducks into a side corridor as they come loping down the passageway.  She presses her back against the wall, here where it's dimmer and the light is is less penetrating, wraps her arms around herself, and presses her eyes shut._

_She can hear them as they pass, the laughter she wants no part of, the kinship and shared looks and unspoken communication that absolutely terrify her.  She peeks out when she thinks they're gone and ducks back when she catches the glint of their metal communicators in the light at the end of the hall._

_They don't see her, because they aren't looking._

Her roommate turns over in her sleep and sighs, her spots just visible against the bed covers in the colorless midnight light.

.

“This would be a lovely color on you,” Deanna says, holding up a length of rose fabric so sheer that Tasha can’t really imagine how anyone would wear it.

Tasha stopped by as promised to go running, and found Deanna apologetic over the mess. There were two large shipping containers on the floor, each spilling over with fabrics that Tasha couldn't imagine what she would do with.  Deanna's mother sent them from the planet where she grew up; all this time Tasha just assumed that she was human too.  “My mother believes in an outfit for every occasion… and the proper accessories. And a man servant to carry her luggage.” Deanna laughs gently and adjusts the fabric over Tasha’s shoulders. "You should take it, I have more than enough."

"You could just put what you don't want in the matter recycler," Tasha says pointedly.

"I know, but I just can't bring myself to. Even if it is Mother's way of saying, 'Little One, don't forget that Betazoid society awaits you...' She doesn't really believe in Starfleet, and has every expectation that I'll settle down and find a husband as soon as I graduate." Deanna tucks ends of fabric back inside one of the shipping boxes and shuts it. "Some days I can't believe I'm going back.  I'll have to figure out something to do with them before then because I'm going to be traveling light."

"You're going back?"

"To get my license. Betazed has one of the best clinical therapy programs in the Federation, and when Mother heard it was an option, well... She's hard to hold back from."

 _Doesn't that frighten you?_ The words are caught in Tasha's throat.  To have the whole horizon in front of you, and turn around and head back where you came from.

Deanna must catch some of her disbelief, because she shakes her head.  "It's just for a few years, and then I'll get my posting, and she and her matchmaking will have no say over it." She grabs her running gear off the end of the bed.  "Come on, let's go."

.

The lake is covered with a coastal mist that dissipates as they jog a few laps together to warm up. Tasha takes it easy to let Troi keep up with her, but then the adrenaline gets the better of her, pumping through her veins as she works her body like a machine.  She lets herself bolt ahead and set the pace. She feels nothing but her run and has lapped Deanna nearly twice.  She's twenty yards back when the other woman finally stops forty minutes later.

Deanna is crouched over, leaning forward on the grass when Tasha catches up.  "Come on, you should cool down. Don't just sit there."

"No, I'm done."  Deanna's breathing is labored. "That was intense." She looks up over her arm, a sheen of sweat on her features. "We should do this again some time."

Tasha collapses next to her, and stretches back against the little knoll. "Yeah, I can be your running coach. Maybe that'll be a good option for me when I get kicked out of here."

"What are you talking about?" Deanna's black eyes are filled with a shock that enervates Tasha.

"I don't know if I'm going to find my place here."

"At the Academy?  The first year is tough, but don't count yourself out."

"In Starfleet.  I mean... why are _you_ here?"  Tasha finally spits out.  "What's in Starfleet for someone like you?"

Deanna takes a moment to consider, as though she is trying to find an answer that will satisfy Tasha's raw searching.  "My father was a Starfleet officer.  When I was a little girl, sometimes he would have to go away for months at a time.  When he would come back, he would bring me little treasures and stories from his missions, and we would sit together as he told me about the things he'd seen and the places he'd been, and everything they'd learned and accomplished.  He was a good storyteller, and I took every piece he gave me and added it to my mental map of what lay beyond our world.  One time... he didn't come back.  And I knew almost from that day, that I had to go and see some of what he'd seen.  For myself, and for him.  I had to know what was out there.  Starfleet gives me that opportunity, and I know I have something to give back."

Her voice itself is soothing, and Tasha finds like so many times before that when her anger evaporates, there is pain behind it.  Pain she is tired of feeling but that she can't quite convince to leave her.  "When I hear you talk about it... I'm not like you, and the other people here. I wasn't raised to have dreams and ambitions and higher goals. All I was raised to do was survive."

"You can't do that here?"

"I don't know." Tasha scuffs her toe in the dirt. There are ducks swimming through the last wisps of fog, turning placidly together against the ripples. "I'm not a scientist. I could've been, maybe, but I haven't been taking calculus since I was seven years old. It's too late to catch up."

"That's nonsense."

"It's true.  The drills this week, I thought maybe I'd finally found something I could do here, but..."  The training officer's voice echoed through her head, and she pulls the elastic out of her ponytail and lets her tangled hair free.  "I can't even get my hair right.  All I ever wanted was to be back out there." She gestures up, where they both know the field of stars lies behind the glare of the sun. "I survived hunger, abandonment, the rape gangs, the narcotics on my planet. I was rescued by Starfleet officers when I was fifteen. I begged them to take me away when they came, and when the ship left orbit..." Tasha's smile is wider and truer than Deanna has ever seen as she imagines the oppressive sun becoming a cool little dot, indistinguishable from the others, forever in the rear view. "It was my first time in space. It was so *empty,* and I felt so calm, so free.  Drugs never even compared to that high." She looks over at Deanna, no longer expecting to find her shocked at the landscape of her truth.  People say that about Betazoids, that they know things and see things.  Maybe Deanna has seen something in her since the first time they met.  "I still had fear, I'm still not over it, but it was different.  I don't believe in Starfleet, not the way you're supposed to. I just wanted to be back out there. Part of the team."

"It sounds to me like you have the ideals exactly right."  Tasha shakes her head, her hair falling across her face.  "Listen to me.  Why do you think you're here?  Don't you think Starfleet knew what they were doing when they accepted you to the Academy?"

"People wash out, it happens all the time."

"Tasha, you are strong, dedicated, and determined to survive.  Haven't you ever considered they looked at those qualities in you and said, we want her on our team, too?"  Deanna takes her hand and squeezes it, lacing their fingers together.  "I can't think of anyone I would rather have with me up there."

.

"Close your eyes." Deanna works her sure fingers through Tasha's hair with something that smells exotic and sweet.  The chiffon or charmeuse or whatever makes up one of Ambassador Troi's beautiful garments is draped around her neck so the hair serum doesn't get on her uniform.  No one else has combed her hair in fifteen years.  The teeth of the comb against her scalp feel impossibly good.

_Have a little confidence._

Tasha feels the whisper of scissors at the back of her neck, and tries to take Deanna's words to heart.

**Author's Note:**

> This story brought to you by "Pensacola" (Deerhunter), "Godspeed" (Jenny Lewis), and "Tulsa Queen" (Emmylou Harris; the title source) on a loop.


End file.
